From the “Tube City Almanac” by Jason Togyer View link
And the Memorial Theater, once a showplace in the style of the major urban movie palaces of the 1920s, had become an albatross instead of an asset. The gloomy, boarded-up hulk loomed over pedestrians going to and from the Sixth Avenue parking garage.

Except for some emergency repairs, the soot-blackened walls of its massive auditorium looked much the same as they had the morning after the fireâ€"except that they were deteriorating with each passing year.

Yet when the Memorial Theater was finally demolished, nine years after the fire, a few people stood on Fifth Avenue and wept againâ€"just as they had on the night of May 21, 1976.

They cried because the cranes ripping down the Memorial’s walls had revealed a surprising, somewhat distressing secret.

It seemed that the remodeling effort to create the two “McKee Cinemas” inside the Memorial’s auditorium had left its ornate 1920s details largely intact.

False walls and ceilings had been erected inside the originals. But above the cheap wallboard and fiber ceiling tiles, gilded grape vines still climbed Moorish columns. The mighty proscenium arch, though injured in a few places, was otherwise as strong and graceful as ever.

And if you squinted through the swirling clouds of dust and debris, you could make out the pale blue ceiling, once decorated with hundreds of twinkling light bulbs to simulate stars.

It was as if the past glories of McKeesportâ€"wiped away first by a massive fire, then by a decade of corporate indifferenceâ€"had come back to taunt the city’s people, one last time.